Third Step

There are 1,440 minutes in a day.  Today is one of those days where I'm living minute to minute.  That's all the farther I can project right now.  I'm also dog sitting for Patrick, one of Primo's litter mates, and at the moment I feel as though I can barely take care of myself, much less three dogs.  I don't think that anything in life can prepare you for the grief of losing a spouse or life partner.  You think that you are doing so well, then all of the sudden you are slammed by an emotion.  I think that within 5 minutes this morning I went from being okay to fear and anxiety to depression, to anger and back to depression.  As I was driving home, I was reminded of the 3rd step in AA. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God. In my early days of sobriety, this was a tough one for me.  I would turn my life and will over to God, then in a minute of fear and anxiety, I would yank it back.  This happened quite often, until the third step became an instinctive way of life for me.  I think that I need to practice the third step daily in my grieving process.  At first I thought that some of these emotions came from the suddenness in how I lost Gar, things would have been different if I had more time to prepare myself.  Now I realize that there is no preparing yourself for losing a spouse, it happens and you are lost.  I am thankful for the discipline of the third step in AA, because I need to start practicing it again, and again.  If I look into the future on my own, all I see is a vast sea of emptiness and loneliness.  I am not sure where I am going to live and I know that there is a lot of loneliness.  If I turn it over to God, I am not afraid.  God has richly blessed me to this point in my life and is not going to stop blessing me now.  I just need to trust God and God's will for me.  So I stop, thank God for thirty wonderful years with Gar, pray for God's will, and leave it in God's hands.  God is good, all the time, even on those minute to minute days.